An intelligent video surveillance (IVS) system should ideally detect, identify, track and classify targets in real-time. It should also send alerts in real-time if targets trigger user-defined rules. The performance of an IVS system is mainly measured by the detection rate and false alarm rate.
In some cases, a surveillance camera associated with an IVS system may have PTZ capability. In such a case, at certain times, the camera may point in one direction, and a user may define rules based on this particular view. At other times, the camera may point in some other direction, and in this situation, the user-defined rules used when the camera is pointing in the first direction may not make sense. As a result, at least some of the alerts generated would be false alarms. Additionally, when a camera points in different directions, corresponding to different scenes (for example, a water scene versus a non-water scene), different target detection algorithms may be desirable. In view of this problem, an IVS system should ideally detect if the camera switches from view to view and should allow a user to configure views and to enable different video surveillance algorithms and to define different rules based on different views.
In some cases, an IVS system may be connected to multiple cameras, where video signals may be fed through a multiplexer, and the system should recognize which camera the current video signal corresponds to and which set of rules should be used.
Additionally, a camera may be moved, or the signal of a camera may be disconnected, possibly by suspicious activities, and in these situations, certain alerts should be sent to the user. Furthermore, sometimes, a camera can not perform well under certain lighting conditions, for example, strong or low light, or a camera may have unusually high noise. In such situations, the IVS system should also notify the user that the video signal has a quality issue and/or that the camera should be checked.